For 15 years, Best Buy’s Geek Squad installation and repair service has served as one key advantage over Amazon that the e-commerce giant seemed unlikely to match.
But over the last few months, Amazon has quietly been hiring an army of in-house gadget experts to offer free Alexa consultations as well as product installations for a fee inside customer homes, multiple sources told Recode, and job postings confirm.
The new offering, which has already rolled out in seven markets without much fanfare, is aimed at helping customers set up a “smart home” — the industry term used to describe household systems like heating and lighting that can be controlled via apps, and increasingly by voice.
While Amazon has a marketplace for third parties to offer home services like TV mounting and plumbing, these new smart-home-related services seem important enough to Amazon that it is hiring its own in-house experts. And perhaps for good reason.
Smart-home gadgets make up one of the fastest-growing segments of the consumer electronics industry, but they can be difficult to set up and integrate with each other. That hurdle has led to higher-than-normal return rates, experts say, so Amazon is likely looking at the in-home services as one way to lower that number.
Perhaps more importantly, controlling the smart home by voice is one of the most promising use cases for Alexa, the virtual assistant built into the Echo line of gadgets, which Amazon is betting heavily on. So it’s not totally surprising that Amazon would make the effort to close the education gap for these products by sending its own hires into customer homes.
An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.
Amazon is charging $99 for installation services like setting up an Ecobee4 Alexa-enabled smart thermostat, though some services are discounted by 20 percent this week. Multi-device set-ups that take more than an…